<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>choices. by scoundrelhan</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27490582">choices.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/scoundrelhan/pseuds/scoundrelhan'>scoundrelhan</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, human!Cas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:07:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,115</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27490582</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/scoundrelhan/pseuds/scoundrelhan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel thinks he’s dying. Humans are always doing that.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Castiel &amp; Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>choices.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Castiel lets them pull him into the car, lets Dean strap him into the passenger seat with a hard expression and shaking hands, lets Sam ramble off things like <em> it took forever to find you </em> and <em> why didn’t you call us </em> and more than once <em> we need to get you to a hospital </em>. Dean keeps shooting Sam these wild, panicked looks, eyes wide with adrenaline and fear, but he doesn’t say anything. Castiel wishes he would at least look at him, tell him how much of an idiot he is, how he’s already running out of time without throwing himself into stupid hunts. </p><p>Anything would be alright.</p><p>He can feel his grace splintering as if it were a mere piece of rotted wood. It crackles, sparks, breaks apart and drifts out through the hollow space in his chest that’s part exit wound and part delirium. They were tiny pieces at first, small enough that Castiel could pretend that the feeling of being sucked dry was his imagination. Now, it’s as if whatever’s left is racing to escape and find a new home, like a hermit crab tired of its shell. He imagines the hole widening to accommodate the efflux, and presses a calloused hand to the spot above his pounding heart, prodding at the useless armor of skin that’s torn to shreds. His useless armor of <em> human </em>skin.</p><p>Except, he’s not even human. He’s some grotesque mutant, the runt of the litter who won’t make it through the night, losing the only thing left that’s well and truly <em> his </em>. There’s a split second before he drifts to sleep that he looks at Dean, and Dean looks at him, and he can see that soul again. It’s a weak flicker of light, blinding and wonderful and painful, but he still, impossibly, perceives it. Dean is shouting something, but he cannot hear anymore.</p><p>For a moment, he is <em> Castiel, </em> the angel, something older than the earth itself, and he is sinking beneath the waves of a nameless ocean, far from the reaches of humanity, with the fading memory of what the stars had felt like beneath his fingertips.</p><p>Castiel thinks he’s dying. </p><p>Humans are always doing that.</p><p>—</p><p>
  <em> There is a long table in a colorless room, and Castiel sits. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Took you long enough.” Dean says, elbows on the tablecloth and an easy smile on his lips. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Suddenly, the sun is shining, and they are not in that sad room anymore. Trees span for miles around them, and their table is only made for two. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>A single shard of glass lies between them. He doesn’t understand, but his mouth won’t do what he wants, won’t open, won’t do anything.</em>
</p><p>
  <em> Dean clicks his tongue, and falls back in his plastic chair, appearing in every way lazy and content, “Well, get on with it. We don’t have much time.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em> Ah, yes. Time. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> It always comes down to time.  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Castiel used to be amused with humanity’s obsession to measure such a fluid subject. Now, in this made up forest with a made up Dean, he feels sick with it, with the need to know how long he’s got. The glass flickers at him, brilliant and familiar, and his chest rips open, pouring blood, blood, so much blood, and Castiel gasps for air. The glass is no longer glass, and Dean is not smiling. Grace floats between them, seemingly suspended in the particles around them, in the air the two of them are breathing. It is beautiful, stunning, the purest white imaginable. The white reaches for him, and he goes to reach back.</em>
</p><p>
  <em> “You have to pick.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em> The blood flows faster, and the forest turns dark, all the lush green bleeding away. The grace appears as if it is going rancid, dripping and fading into the table with the pungent stench of rot. Dean is fading into the shadows, his lips moving around the words as he continues to meld with the darkness.</em>
</p><p>You gotta pick, Cas.</p><p>
  <em> Castiel understands.</em>
</p><p>—</p><p>When he wakes up, Castiel’s inside one of the bunker’s spare rooms that’s filled to the brim with old files and cardboard boxes. There are three pillows shoved behind his aching back. When he tries to sit up further, his chest erupts into searing pain.</p><p>“Where do you think you’re going, hot shot?”</p><p>Dean’s seated to his left in an old foldout chair. He’s unnervingly pale, which in turn brings out the dark circles beneath his eyes. Castiel doesn’t have to ask to be sure he hasn’t slept.</p><p>“What happened?”</p><p>“Well, we found you on the side of some god damned logging road with a fucking rock salt shot to the chest. You were pretty banged up. I did what I could, but I think you needed to sleep it off.” </p><p>Castiel can sense the anger, the pure rage, but it’s as if Dean’s too exhausted to both play and look the part. Dean sags like a deflated balloon, forehead pressed directly to the thin sheets bunched around Castiel’s thighs, hands palm down on either side of his head. He looks defeated.</p><p>“I dreamed,” Castiel says into the silence, right hand itching to touch the hair brushing over his busted knuckles. “I’ve never dreamed before.”</p><p>He wants to remember, but he can’t. His worthless human memory is already dislodging the images to make way for more thoughts; it’s like trying to stop sand from flowing through a sieve.</p><p><em> A choice. There was a choice </em>.</p><p>“Hmm,” Dean hums, clenching his hands into tight fists and then releasing. Clench, release, repeat.</p><p>
  <em> A choice. And Dean.</em>
</p><p>Castiel shifts again, wincing as the stitches pull taught and protest, and there’s a terrible crick in his neck and a dull throb in his lower back. He feels irrevocably human. He <em> feels </em>. Not half-angel, not anything except… Human.</p><p>He made a choice. There is no more grace left in him. </p><p>Castiel realizes he is okay with this. There’s nowhere that his grace could take him that would make him happier than here, nothing it could grant him that would fill the emptiness in him quite like the soft wisps of brown hair tickling his fingers, or the warmth of the quilt tucked in around his sore legs, or the lulling exhales of the man beside him.</p><p>Dean lurches up into a somewhat sitting position, a faint smile tugging at his lips and a rare sort of tenderness in his gaze. </p><p>“So, uh, how does breakfast sound?”</p><p>Castiel knows that there was never really a question. He has always and will always make the same choice.</p><p>“Wonderful.”</p><p>They have time.</p><p>—</p><p>“I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly...” <em>Castle</em>, Kafka</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>